Home office rules in Austria: the Telework Act and remote staff

The change on 1 January 2025 was more than a new label. The old rules in § 2h AVRAG centred on work in the employee’s own home. The Telework Act replaced the word Homeoffice with Telearbeit and widened the idea to cover any agreed place outside the employer’s premises.

That now includes the employee’s home, the home of a close relative, a co-working space and other locations the two sides agree on. What stays outside the definition is occasional work from a café or a train. The work has to be regular, so a standing arrangement of two days a week from a co-working desk in Graz is telework, while answering emails at an airport gate is not.

For an employer the useful consequence is clarity. A team that works partly from home and partly from shared offices can now sit under one set of rules, written into one agreement, rather than relying on informal permission that nobody recorded.

It also forces a decision that many employers used to avoid. Under the old wording, a manager could let someone stay at home most of the week without anyone writing down where the work happened. Under the new law that arrangement is telework, and telework without a written agreement is a gap in the employer’s paperwork rather than a perk. Teams that drifted into remote work after 2020 are worth reviewing for exactly that reason.

Telework must be agreed in writing, and the agreement should name the place or places where it happens. Neither side can impose it: the employer cannot send someone home permanently by instruction, and the employee cannot decide alone to work from a relative’s house in Tyrol. It is a contract term like pay or hours.

Because the place of work is part of the agreement, it is worth being specific. A good telework clause usually covers:

• the agreed locations, such as the employee’s home address and, if relevant, a named co-working space;
• how many days a week, or which days, are worked away from the office;
• how working time is recorded when nobody sees the employee arrive or leave;
• equipment and running costs, including whether the €3 daily allowance is paid;
• data protection and confidentiality for work done outside company premises;
• how and when the employee can be reached.

If the job is fully remote from the start, the telework agreement sits alongside the employment contract and the written terms described in our article on what an Austrian Dienstzettel must contain. It is not a side letter that can be left until later.

A relative’s home deserves a specific mention. Many employees split their week between their own flat in Vienna and family elsewhere in Austria, especially around school holidays. If that pattern is regular, the relative’s address belongs in the agreement too, because it affects which journeys accident insurance covers and where the employer can expect the employee to be.

Either party can end a telework arrangement with one month’s notice, provided there is a good reason. The employment itself carries on; only the agreed place of work changes. A good reason might be a move to a flat with no workable space, on the employee’s side, or a role change that needs presence in the office, on the employer’s side.

For an employer with no office in Austria the question is a practical one, because there may be nowhere else for the employee to work. In that case the telework agreement is effectively the job’s place of work, and ending it is a far bigger step than it would be for a company with a Vienna office.

That is a reason to think about fully remote roles from the outset. If the person will never have a desk to return to, write that into the contract and the telework agreement together, so that nobody later reads the remote arrangement as a temporary favour.

Employees use the notice right as well. A person who agreed to work from home three days a week and finds that the arrangement no longer suits their household can ask to return to the office with a month’s notice, if there is an office to return to and a good reason for the change. Where there is no office, the conversation is about the job itself, and it is better had early.

Statutory accident insurance covers telework. An accident while working at the agreed location is treated as an accident at work, in the same way as one in an office. Journeys are treated more strictly. The commute is insured only for telework in the narrow sense defined by the law, so a trip to a co-working space the employee picked for convenience may fall outside the cover. Agreeing the locations in advance makes it clear which journeys count.

Working-time law applies at home exactly as it does on company premises. Normal hours are eight a day and 40 a week unless the collective agreement sets fewer, and with overtime a day can reach 12 hours and a week 60, averaging no more than 48 over 17 weeks. Overtime premiums are exactly what they would be in the office. Without a manager nearby, these limits are easy to drift past, so the telework agreement should say how hours are recorded.

Sick leave, care leave and the 25 working days of annual leave are unchanged by telework. If an employee falls ill at home, the same Entgeltfortzahlung (continued pay) applies as for anyone else. The weeks of full and half pay are listed in our piece on continued pay for sick employees.

An employer may pay a telework allowance of up to €3 per telework day free of tax, for a maximum of 100 days a year. That caps the tax-free amount at €300 a year. Whether to pay it, and how much up to the limit, is something to settle in the telework agreement so that payroll treats every month the same way.

Paying it is mostly a question of goodwill and of covering real costs such as electricity and heating. For an employee who works from home three days a week, the 100-day cap is reached by about the middle of the year, so the allowance is better seen as a fixed annual contribution of up to €300 than as a daily rate.

The arithmetic is simple. One telework day a week over a working year comes to roughly 45 days, or about €135 tax-free. Two days a week gets close to the 100-day limit. A fully remote employee reaches it in spring and receives the same €300 as someone working from home two days a week, and any top-up beyond that is ordinary taxable pay.

Payroll needs the number of telework days to apply it correctly, which is another reason to record them. If the hire is employed through an EOR, those days feed into the monthly payroll run in the same way as overtime or absences.

Many Austrian remote workers have an employer outside the country. The home office rules do not change because of that: a person living and working in Austria is hired on Austrian terms, registered with ÖGK through ELDA before starting, and paid through Austrian payroll with Lohnsteuer (wage tax) withheld and filed with the tax office. The collective agreement, the 14 salary payments and the five weeks of leave come with the job.

There are two usual ways for a foreign business to become that employer: found an Austrian subsidiary, or let an EOR hold the contract. If you choose Employer of Record Austria, the Austrian employment contract is between your hire and us, a telework agreement is drafted at the same time, and we run payroll while you direct the work. Our page on EOR services in Austria lists what is included, and our explanation of the EOR’s role shows how the work divides between you and us.

Two cross-border questions come up often. First, nationality: a holder of an EU or EEA passport can start without a permit, but most other nationals need a residence title that allows work, often the employer-specific card described in our article on the Red-White-Red Card in 2026. Second, work from another country. An Austrian employee who wants to spend weeks working from abroad raises tax and social security questions in that other country, which need checking before the trip rather than after.

The payroll side of a remote Austrian job holds few surprises. The employer pays 20.98% social insurance on regular pay in 2026, the 1.53% severance fund contribution and the payroll levies; the 3% Kommunalsteuer is owed to the local authority in whose area the workplace lies, and the small Vienna employer levy applies only to a Vienna workplace. The employee receives 14 salary payments under the collective agreement, as any office-based colleague would.

A remote start in Austria goes smoothly when the paperwork is finished before the laptop is shipped. Six points should be settled in writing before the first working day, and each of them is easier to agree with a candidate than to retrofit with an employee who has already settled into a routine.

• The telework agreement, naming each location and the weekly pattern.
• How hours are recorded, so the 12-hour and 60-hour caps can be shown to have been respected.
• Whether the €3 daily allowance is paid, and who reports the telework days to payroll.
• Equipment, data handling and how the employee is reached during the day.
• For a non-EU national, the residence and work title, checked before any contract is signed.
• A plan for any work from abroad, so that it is cleared before the employee travels.

None of this needs an Austrian office. It needs a correct contract, a clear telework agreement and payroll that knows which days were worked where. If you are comparing providers for this kind of fully remote hire, the questions to put to any Austrian EOR provider include several on telework.